


living is harder

by darlingofdots



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: Angst, Depression, Getting Together, Kissing, Laurence is bad at emotions, M/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Slash, it'll all be okay i promise, that bit in VoE when Laurence finally breaks, this is a lot angstier than my usual but i promise it'll be alright
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21794968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: 'Laurence, what are you doing?'
Relationships: William Laurence/Tenzing Tharkay
Comments: 10
Kudos: 81





	living is harder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maledictius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maledictius/gifts).



> this fic does not contain actual self-harm, but if that is a topic you are sensitive to, please proceed with caution. it's only a small moment and it's entirely an accident, but i don't want you to get hurt.

As his sovereign descended into madness and his country bled at the hands of the enemy he had chosen to protect, William Laurence went cold. It was easier, with ice around his heart, to do as Wellesley asked of him, to do his  _ duty _ , and when the other captains tried to challenge their orders, they saw the hard glint in his eyes and thought better of it. 

Temeraire was harder to deter, and some distant part of Laurence hated himself for the harshness with which he responded to the dragon’s hesitant questions, voiced with as much delicacy as his nature would allow. In years past, Laurence would have made an attempt to assuage his fears – sat down with him over the maps and dispatches and explained the tactics and politics behind their superiors’ decisions – but he felt keenly that this time, he must not. Better for him not to know, and he told himself that this resolution let him rest a little easier.

What was one more lie in the mountain of falsehoods he told himself every day? It mattered nothing and made no difference. He was ice, and could not afford to melt.

They darted across the country in what felt sharply like a wild goose chase, though none of them could have quite said what they were chasing. The dragons squabbled among themselves about prizes and strategies, and Laurence let them, preferring the arguments and indignant huffs over outright questions. The other captains grew quieter, eventually, and although they kept up a good effort to include him in their conversation and left a space for him around their campfires, some distant part of him noticed that more than once, his approach seemed to interrupt a heated debate which was never taken up again in his hearing. That part noticed, too, the way Emily contrived to be within earshot at every possible opportunity, and the urgent whispers she exchanged with Demane when she thought he could not see.

But this, too, he ignored. He let the ice absorb it, and went on with his work.

Winter turned reluctantly into spring; they had been raiding for two months when Arkady carried Tharkay into camp in a flurry of wings and dragon chatter. Laurence took him inside the cottage where he had set up for the night, so they might speak privately. There were new orders from Wellesley, not much changed from the last, and Laurence set them aside to consult his maps again. 

‘I will send you along with Berkley,’ he said to Tharkay, ‘and free the rest of us to go after them at Stickney; if you begin near the outpost and circle inwards, you are likely to find the foragers soon enough –‘

‘I beg your pardon,’ Tharkay said, ‘but I prefer not.’

Laurence had been reaching for a pen to draw in the new routes, but at Tharkay’s interruption his hand came to a grinding, jolting halt mid-air above the table. 

Tharkay continued: ‘I have not the luxury of setting aside, for a time, the veneer of civilisation; I must be a little more careful. A temporary viciousness may be pardonable in a gentleman, even admirable; but it must brand  _ me  _ forever a savage.’ He paused, and seemed to choose his next words with infinite care: ‘Laurence, what are you doing?’

The question was simple enough. There were a dozen answers Laurence might have chosen, and all of them ought to be satisfactory, but none came to mind that he could stomach to speak aloud. The whole farce tastes like ashes in his mouth, and he is ice. ‘Killing soldiers,’ he said at last, feeling the bile rise in his throat. ‘I am killing soldiers, and asking honourable men to do the same. Good God,’ he said, suddenly choking, and finding he could not go on, buried his head in his hands. From the hayloft drifted a vague yet familiar scent of horses, long vanished, and outside the dragons’ bickering drowned out any other noise. 

He had known, of course he had known; the ugliness, the sheer cowardly disgust of it all had sat for two months in his mind and had been held back only by whatever thin excuses he had forced himself to make for his country. This, he supposed, was the punishment, the true punishment for his sins, where months in the cells of blockade ships and the constant threat of the noose had not been sufficient to make him repent.

‘Laurence,’ Tharkay said, and when no reply came, ‘Will,’ with more difficulty, as if the name was uncomfortable on his tongue. ‘Will, I meant no accusation.’

The heels of his hands still pressed to his eyes, Laurence clenched his fists until the uneven edges of his nails threatened to draw blood, and even then he could not quite raise his head. ‘You would have the right of it. Another item on the tally of my sins; it cannot make much difference, now.’ There could be no forgiveness for him, he now understood; whatever hope he had still carried had been shattered the moment he accepted the assignment.

Outside, Arkady launched into a repeat performance of his latest conquest. Inside, Tharkay’s leather flying gloves landed dully on the table. ‘Damn you, Will Laurence.’

Finally, he looked up. Tharkay still stood before him, his head and hands bare and his face red with cold. There was a streak of grey in his hair and mud on his clothes. He leant forward now, both hands flat on the tabletop. They were very close – he was frowning.

Laurence blinked and shook his head. ‘I must beg your forgiveness; you are not at fault, and deserve better than to have my black moods taken out on you. Clearly I am not fit for company. I will ask –‘

But then Tharkay’s lips were on his, and he swallowed whatever he had meant to say. Tharkay’s face was cold, battered by decades of sun and wind, but his breath on Laurence’ skin carried the heat of desert afternoons and cheap rum and too-sweet tea, and he could only close his eyes and hope he would not melt away completely.

‘Pray do not presume to know the kind of company I prefer,’ Tharkay said at last, pulling away. He did not look repentant, but he raised his hand to his head as if attempting to adjust his hat and, finding nothing there, dropped it again stiffly to his side. ‘I thought you knew me better by now.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Laurence said, automatically, without thinking. That an apology was due was he quite certain, though for what he ought to be apologising, he was not sure. 

‘Damn you,’ Tharkay said again. ‘I have made a hash of this all. But I cannot blame you for it, although I suppose you will blame yourself anyway without my assistance.’ He picked up his gloves from the tabletop and fidgeted it between his fingers, a habit utterly unlike him and yet somehow Laurence was utterly transfixed by the glide of worn leather on weathered skin. The other man’s knuckles were a confusion of small, sharp scars in various stages of fading – he remembered Tharkay nursing a bleeding hand out in the desert, after his bird had once again nipped at him, and he remembered too that Tharkay had never lashed out at the creature in anger despite the pain it had caused him, and somehow that  _ meant _ something –

‘Stop,’ Tharkay said, breaking his train of thought. ‘Will, stop.’ 

Laurence had felt the pain in some distant corner of his mind, dulled, like pricking one's finger in a snowstorm. He had gripped the hilt of his penknife and driven the blade a quarter inch deep into the tabletop; the base of the blade digging into the soft flesh of his palm, drawing a bead of blood. He opened his hand abruptly, sending the knife clattering across the table. He stared at the drop of red welling up from his hand, unmoving, until Tharkay reached across the spread of maps with a sigh of resignation and pressed a surprisingly clean handkerchief to the cut.

'If you would prefer me to leave,' he said, securing the piece of cloth with a knot that looked more complicated than necessary, 'you need only say the word, and never have to see me again if that is your wish.' His eyes met Laurence's, who felt his cheeks flush.

Once, in the Taklamakan, he had turned his head at the wrong moment and breathed in a lungful of hot sand. Now, in a dusty cottage with Tharkay still cradling his bleeding hand and offering to disappear from his life forever, Laurence swallowed hard once, twice, deliberately turned his hand so the tips of his fingers rested on the underside of Tharkay's wrists, and said: 'Nothing could be further from my mind.'

The other man held his gaze. To a stranger, he might have appeared entirely calm now, but Laurence realised belatedly how familiar his features had grown to him, how intimately aware he was of every minutiae of expression, because he could see the turmoil in his eyes, the insecurity, the need - and the ice inside him did not melt, but it cracked a little, and that was enough for now.

It was enough to get to his feet and wait, stupidly, as Tharkay walked around the makeshift desk between them. It meant he had to let go of Laurence's hand, which Laurence regretted, and he did not reach for him again when they stood face to face with no barrier between them but their own uncertainty. In all his life Laurence had never felt so at sea; he was sharply aware that this moment was the only grace he would ever be given and if he fell short he would be lost without hope of returning to course.

'I can only hope to be deserving of your company,' he told Tharkay, aware of how disastrously inaccurate that was and incapable of doing anything about it. Of course he did not deserve it - dear God above, there was a warrant of execution out in his name.

‘Laurence,’ the other man said, and finally, finally took his hand again. The small cut stung under the makeshift bandage, and Laurence raised their joint hands to his lips. Nothing had ever required as much courage as the brief, tentative kiss he pressed to Tharkay’s fingers. They stood for a moment across from each other. Neither of them spoke.

Then Laurence was clutching at the lapels of Tharkay’s coat and Tharkay’s hands were fighting the strip of leather Laurence used to tie his hair and there were teeth and tongues and lips and mingling breath and when they broke apart, Tharkay held him while his body heaved with long, wracking sobs. It was not regret and it was not quite relief - it was a flood of emotion he could not name and did not understand. He could not remember the last time he had cried, nor a time when someone had held him with such tenderness, which was made all the worse by the fact that he knew Tharkay would expect nothing in return and, if he asked it of him, leave that minute and never speak of this again. Laurence knew, too, without thinking, that that was the last thing he could possibly want, and that he was a fool.

When he came back to himself, Tharkay’s arms were still around him. Outside, the sun had dipped below the trees so the only light came from two lamps hung from the rafters with bits of rope; their flames cast dancing shadows and dipped everything in a faint yellow tint. 

‘I never meant to cause you distress,’ Tharkay said. He had abandoned his carefully blank mask and if Laurence had not been weary to the bone, the look in his eyes might have brought him to tears again. ‘Only I could not stand by and watch any longer - You will not dig your own grave for the executioners’ convenience. I won’t allow it.’

Laurence wished he could have protested. He did not  _ want  _ to die, would have hotly denied the accusation had it come from anybody, but from the moment Temeraire had landed back in England after their madcap flight to France Laurence had not fought back against the tide of fate. He had accepted the prospect of his death when he proposed the scheme to Temeraire; when the Admiralty decided to keep him alive to guarantee the dragon’s cooperation he had felt no relief, only dull resignation. 

He squared his shoulders. His eyes were red and hot, his limbs heavy with a new kind of exhaustion, but he could feel the weight of Tharkay’s - Tenzing’s - hand between his shoulder blades and the warmth of his body against his. ‘How long?’ he asked. He felt like he had known for years and yet had been completely oblivious until not half an hour ago, and he hated the thought that they might have had this all along.

‘Oh,’ Tenzing said in an attempt at lightheartedness, ‘not before Istanbul’, and Laurence caught himself apologising once again.

‘Will you stay tonight?’ he asked later, having read Wellesley’s orders and burnt them to ash. ‘I understand if you would prefer not to.’

‘Will, this won’t do. Come, look at me; I thought we trusted each other. Yes, I will stay. As long as you will have me.’

Laurence swallowed. A single afternoon could not be enough to put them on steady ground, not with times being what they were. There would be choices to be made, and sacrifices, sooner than either of them would like. They were still who they had been an hour ago, both of them up to their necks in a war that looked more hopeless by the day, and neither tears nor kisses could change that, but God above - ‘Stay here tonight,’ he said. ‘I shall reply to Wellesley in the morning and tell him to go to hell.’

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday babe, plf, sorry about this


End file.
